Thursday, November 25, 2004

Compiler Optimization for Speed on an Athlon-XP System

"These results were obtained by running a script with different sets of optimization flags and measuring the run time results of the same floating-point intensive analytic code on the same set of data. The script cleaned and recompiled the code with the given set of flags, and logged the results. Inorder to reproduce the same background load on the machine each time, the xscreensaver daemon was killed, along with any other X-applications (such as mozilla, open-office, etc). The only other applications running were a few xterms, gkrellm, a window manager (Enlightenment in this case). Due to asynchronous loading of mail polling, and other monitor updates, there was an observed timing uncertainty of roughly half a second, meaning that run time differences of 1 second may not be statistically significant. For a more detailed discussion of the methology, flags, and results for other systems, follow the links:"